Strong Daily Habits Will Make You a Successful Self-Learner
Success as a self-learner is a habit rather than a destination.
Pragmatic Curiosity helps you harness your curiosity to become a self-learner. Thank you for reading.
Summary
🤔🤔 Choose curiosity: being curious is an active choice you have to make.
🎨🧩 Choose creation: creating something that makes you proud is a source of primal satisfaction.
☀️📅 Choose daily habits: action every day beats heavy bursts occasionally.
What is success to you? Money, achievements, knowledge, relations?
The truth is your perspective doesn’t matter. Success is a habit.
Choose curiosity over algorithms
Technology has allowed us access. Anything we are curious about, at our fingertips — neatly packaged with a pretty little red bow by those who have the knowledge and experience we seek. While you’d think this would make us more curious as a whole, it didn’t.
It made us lazier.
We never have to search for answers. We seek quick responses to someone else’s question. Open a browser, input your query, get the answer, go about your day.
Repeat.
If the question requires taking our time, why bother? Even if we absorb and internalize it better — it just takes so long, right? We’ve lost the habit of contemplating the answers to our own questions.
We use technology more for entertainment than education.
The gap in time wasted has widened. There’s an untold number of brilliant people out there, concocting devious schemes to keep you glued, pacified and ready to watch their next ad. Resist.
They prey on your diversive curiosity, making time fly by without your noticing.
Choose creation over consumption
I’ve struggled with this for as long as I can remember.
I never considered myself a creative person. I liked checking items off a list. Acquire a special weapon in World of Warcraft. Vacuum. Make dinner.
I’d be hesitant to do something without a specific goal. Uncertain processes are nebulous, harder to quantify.
I wanted to create games (I know, how unique nowadays), but the industry was filled with naive young people, all too eager to be ran down. Or maybe I wasn’t enough of a dreamer. So I chose to be content. Content with keeping apace with an ever-growing list to consume.
Then a switch flipped.
I was unfulfilled creatively. I felt a desire to create, a need to pursue a new path. I got serious about writing.
In pursuing writing, I came to realize how important creation is.
Creating something gives you a feeling of primal satisfaction. When consuming, sure, the days pass, but will you want them to? When will the glass shatter?
What will you be able to hold out and proudly exclaim: I made this?
Consumption has its place. I love games. They’ve provided me with solace through some of my loneliest times. The key is purposeful consumption.
A purpose you decide.
If it’s consumption for creation — fantastic. If it’s for relaxation — wonderful.
But, in the deluge of content, do not neglect to create for yourself.
Choose consistency over small bursts of action
At my university we’d end each semester with 4 exams. Without fail, the outcomes would trend better for the courses we put more effort into early, even if the total time spent was the same.
For some courses we’d cram late. Days of just studying. It’s no wonder we’d struggle to remember anything after that overload of information.
For others, we took an approach with a longer time-horizon. Through creating flashcards and using Anki, we unfolded the learning.
10 minutes a day, 5 minutes a day — anything, as long as it was consistent.
The Japanese word for “memorization”, Anki uses techniques such as active recall testing and spaced repetition. It’s a wonderful tool for memorization. But the learning doesn’t stop there.
Real learning requires applying the knowledge.
The culmination is daily habits
Curiosity —> Creation —> Consistency.
Here’s one note I want to highlight, one quote to make you ponder and one post/note from another creator I enjoyed this week.
1. The Note
2. The Quote
Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement - James Clear
3. The Promote
This week, I enjoyed reading Stefano Miele of Good To Know explaining his choice of staying sober for 43 days, found here:
Nice summary of how to learn. An underrated skill not taught in formal education, at least not early on...
I really enjoyed this post, Rasmus. It resonated strongly with me, especially your points about purposeful consumption and creativity.
Your mention of games particularly struck a chord. Like you, I've found games to be an important part of my life. I agree that the key is in purposeful consumption. There's often that moment of realization when you're playing a game you once enjoyed, but suddenly it hits you -- you're not actually enjoying it anymore. Instead, you're playing out of habit or compulsion. It's as if the game's mechanisms have stripped away your choice.
It's a powerful reminder of why we need to stay conscious of how we spend our time and energy, whether in gaming, learning, or creating.